Rhymes with Shmaliens
by BovinePirate
Summary: After the collapse of the Hellmouth, Xander is on a road-trip in search of retirement. Drama & intrigue ensues when he stops off in Colorado Springs and bites off more than he can chew when he bites the head off a snake that came out of a guy's face. Or Come watch Xander try to snark the secrets of the SGC out of Jack!
1. Chapter 1

Disclaimer: I have no claim on either Buffy: The Vampire Slayer or Stargate SG-1. They belong to their respective creators.

Setting: This is post-season 7 for Buffy but not including any of the comics. It has been longer since I have watched Sg-1 so I am not as clear on the time frame for them. So lets just say it is set somewhere before the destruction of the Gou'ld for Stargate.

Colonel Jack O'Neil was cursing. It was an activity which he had been involved in for the entire half hour drive from his house into town, and he was starting to run out of properly indelicate words to demonstrate his irritation, when Daniel finally spoke up.

"Calm down a little Jack." The nervous archeologist was currently driving the two of them, while trying not to let the older man's ire distract him from the road. The area around Cheyenne Mountain was always fairly devoid of humanity, but there was still some traffic on a Wednesday afternoon. Besides, the winter snow had already set up camp in late November in Colorado, and Daniel was a naturally cautious person, at least when there was no imminent threat of alien invasion.

"Those stupid NID bastards!" Jack responded, paying little heed to his teammate's words. "When are they gonna learn that an alien snake with a god complex does not make a good subject for a science fair project?" While Jack's tone may have not lost any of its ire, he was using full sentences now and Daniel took that as a small victory.

"You know, I told Hammond this would happen when those thugs made it through the gate three months ago. I knew we should have sent a team after them as soon as we got control back."

"He made the right call," Daniel rebutted with strained patience. "Without preparing a UAV or a MALP we had no way of knowing that they didn't accidentally send themselves to the surface of Mercury or into the middle of a volcano."

"Well they didn't, did they?" Jack asked with acid on his tongue. "Instead they got themselves a snake, brought it back for testing, let it escape, and now it's attacking Tokyo."

"But it's not in Tokyo, it's in Colorado Springs." Daniel amended thoughtfully after a few seconds.

"Well, I suppose the body count is lower at least."

"That's not what I mean. Don't you think this is a little too convenient? Somehow they get a hold of a living Goa'uld and somehow they bring it back to Earth and the first thing they do is set it down in our backyard to find. Isn't that strange to you?"

"Maybe they just thought they were hiding in plain sight," Jack suggested disinterestedly.

"Do you really think they are that stupid, Jack?"

"Considering how many times they've managed to let their own projects tear them a new one, yes, Daniel, I think they are exactly that stupid."

"I'm just saying we should keep our eyes out for anything weird when we get there," Daniel cautioned with a sigh. "I don't want to jump head first into a trap."

"Your concerns are duly- Right here, right here!" Jack shouted, interrupting himself to gesture wildly out the passenger window of the car.

"What was that about?" Daniel asked after correcting a wildly illegal right turn into the oncoming lane of traffic.

"The people on the sidewalk are running from something," Jack observed, exhibiting a tone worthy of the title of Colonel for the first time in the conversation. "That Starbucks up on the left, pull over here."

Daniel did as he was told and the two of them got out of the car and surveyed the scene. The few people you would have expected to see tooling around the semi-urban street at 4:30pm on a Wednesday had all vacated the area. All that remained were two men staring at each other in the open seating area of the nearby Starbucks, and one man on the ground beside them, with his head turned at just enough of an angle, that Daniel was certain he would never be getting up again. One of the two conscious men had to be the Goa'uld, but they didn't have enough information to tell which. For what it was worth Daniel's money was on the young man with the eye patch. A normal kid that young shouldn't have lost an eye unless he had led a very interesting life. That wasn't enough to go on though. The two of them hadn't been expecting to be called into action so suddenly and all they had was Jack's sidearm and a taser Daniel had long ago stashed in his glove box. For not the first time, Daniel wished Hammond would issue Zat'nik'tels as standard weapons for all his officers.

At the moment, the best they could do was tuck their respective weapons under their coats and hope they would have enough time between the Goa'uld revealing himself and the other man dying to act. They tried to approach the cafe as nonchalantly as possible in the situation and were blessed by the fact that the men each seemed too focused on the other, to pay them any heed. Slowly the two started to circle one another until the eye patched man was directly between them and his opponent. Then they stopped and the bi-ocular man's eyes flashed and he declared, "You should not dare stand in the presence of a god, kneel," in a haughty, distorted tone.

"I've heard this whole song and dance before," the man in the eye patch responded, in an entirely too casual tone to have just encountered an alien species for the first time. "Can we just get on with it; I have a seven dollar cup of coffee that's getting cold in there."

At this the Goa'uld let out a displeased shout and lunged at the boy who jerked back in surprise and stumbled over a chair behind him, falling to the ground. As the youth hit the earth, the two professionals recovered from their shock at his cavalier attitude and rushed to try and save him, but they both knew they wouldn't make it in time.

What happened next was almost too fast for even Colonel O'Neil to understand. The boy tucked his feet under the chair, which had served as his stumbling block, and immediately kicked upwards. The Goa'uld, who had leapt forward in order to land heavily on the boy's chest, instead collided with the chair mid jump and tumbled onto the ground next to the kid. Before anyone could react to this, the boy adeptly rolled over on top of the Goa'uld, withdrawing what looked like the sharpened leg of table from his coat and stabbing it through the Goa'uld's heart.

Jack and Daniel could only stare in stunned silence at the kid who supposedly, upon meeting his first Goa'uld, killed it with furniture. While the pair were trying to remember which way was up, the youth seemed to be concerned with whether his quarry was actually dead or not. As he started to look over the face of the man whom he had just impaled, the dying parasite took this as it's last chance at survival. It tried to jump into the open mouth of the boy who reacted immediately, bringing both of his hands up to grab the little snake's tail and closing his mouth hard on reflex, biting the head of the Goa'uld off.

When the youth opened his mouth again, the snake's head fell out landing gently on the corpse of its host. He then let go of the body and crawled away a few feet before proceeding to vomit profusely. After watching the kid void his stomach, Daniel walked up behind him and shot him with the Taser until he fell unconscious, because he wasn't sure what else he was supposed to do. "What exactly do we do now?" Daniel asked surveying the carnage around them.

"I had originally hoped for turkey, but somehow I've lost my appetite," Jack answered before pulling out a phone to call his commander.

Xander Harris awoke handcuffed to a table in a concrete room with a monster headache and a taste in his mouth that reminded him of the time in kindergarten when Willow had convinced him that the rotted drywall in his basement was cotton candy flavored. Objectively this was not the worst situation he had ever woken up in. During high school he had been kidnapped by a giant praying mantis and his life had gone downhill from there. Still the vaguely governmental vibe he was getting brought back some particularly bad memories and put him in an even darker mood. This was partly why, when the two men finally showed up to have a nice chat with him, he didn't even let them get through their introductions before he started saying the word, "mouthwash" over and over again for ten minutes until the smaller one with glasses finally decided to play good cop and get him some of the stuff and a bucket to spit it in.

When he was able to close his mouth without wanting to scream aimless obscenities he turned to the men and said, "You guys look like the G.I. Joe type, well half of you anyway. You army men?"

"Yes," Captain Salt and Pepper answered, clearly trying to recover the patience which he had lost to Xander's previous antics. "As I was saying I am Colonel-"

"Call Riley Finn, he's a Captain or a Sargent or… I can never remember. Anyway he's with a black opsy part of the army in South America right now. Call him and he'll tell you that you want to let me go." In the past year and a half since Xander had left the crater which was once Sunnydale behind, he had needed to rely on this card on several occasions when he or a local slayer had been involved in a tussle with the civil authorities. This was the first time he had actually been detained by an officer of the army, but it was also the first time he had murdered someone in broad daylight so close to a military base, so he thought it was probably fair.

"W-What?" Mr. I Love Books asked, clearly completely surprised by the combination of candor and complete non-compliance associated with that statement. He certainly never would have expected some shadowy governmental agent operating on US soil to declare the name of his commanding officer in the first three sentences of a discussion.

"Riley Finn, with 2 n's," Xander answered, helpfully holding up two fingers. "He'll tell you to let me go, or we could just cut out the middle man and you could let me go now." It wasn't fair, but whenever Xander was put in this kind of situation, he couldn't help but prod at his interrogators a little. Perhaps it was his own little revenge for how incompetent the Sunnydale PD had been. Now, there was a group of men who were always trying to add one more to the answer to the question, 'how many grill fork accidents do you need to cover before you start getting suspicious?'

"Let you go?" Mr. Books asked incredulously. "You do know that you stabbed another man to death, right?"

"Yes, but I did watch him try and twist another guy's head off first, so I'm pretty sure you can count that as self-defense. Hell, you might even call it a public service… Does that mean I get a medal?"

"Certainly not if anyone hears you talking like that," the man now properly identified as COLONEL Salt and Pepper, answered with a smile.

For a heartbeat, Xander was caught completely off guard. That statement almost made the man seem like he had a sense of humor, which Xander knew was against government policy. Besides, no matter how much he smiled, the man's eyes were clearly evaluating him. Once Xander had recovered, he put on a show of ruefulness as he said, "Right, everyone thinks humility is so important nowadays. And here I was hoping to get a medal and one of those giant skeleton keys that you can't get rid of and don't really fit anywhere."

"You know I don't think they give those out to anyone, unless you are in the 1950's and a cartoon," the Colonel answered, his smile broadening.

"Jack," Mr. Books said chasteningly.

"Right," the Colonel, who must be Jack, said to his colleague. He then immediately turned back to Xander with a straight face and said, "What do you know about the Goa'uld?"

This question was clearly meant to surprise Xander, who had been theoretically led into a false sense of security. Regardless of his mental state, Xander was surprised by the man's sudden development of a speech impediment. After hearing the question, Xander blinked a few times before finally responding, "Are you asking about ghouls? They're like fancy zombies, right? Like, zombies... with top hats. Why?"

"Goa'uld," Mr. Books repeated, slowly emphasizing every painfully foreign syllable.

Xander stared at the bespectacled man for a few seconds before turning back to Jack and asking in a conspiratorial whisper. "Is he… special?"

On hearing this, Jack burst into uproarious laughter that took almost a full minute to settle down. In response, his colleague gave him a dirty look before turning to Xander and trying a new tact, "Why were you carrying a sharpened wooden stake?"

"I am interested in pitching tents," Xander answered with a completely straight face.

"With one stake, no frame, and no canvas? I would say you have a lot to learn," Jack replied.

"Would you believe me if I said I was building a really tiny fence?"

"I would believe you more if you said you were trying to plant a table tree."

"I was trying to plant-"

"Answer the question," Mr. Books said seriously, interrupting Xander's response.

"Looks like our Danny Boy is getting cranky, you better give us a proper reply, kid," Jack added with a smirk.

"Is this rapport we're developing? It's weird, I feel strangely violated," Xander replied, looking at the older man. Seeing that neither of them were going to bite at that, Xander sighed, leaned back in his chair and gave the best explanation he could come up with over the years. "I'm a carpenter by trade and it doesn't feel right wasting wood. So scraps I can't really use for anything else, I sharpen and carry around for a while, for protection. It makes me feel safe."

"So you are telling us that you keep a stake to protect you from car jackings?" the man that was now Danny, or probably Daniel would fit him better, asked incredulously.

"You would be surprised how effective it can be," Xander answered with a helpfully earnest expression. "If you pull a knife on a guy and he gets out a sharp stick like he's ready to rumble, that guy's crazy. You run from him."

Jack chuckled and said, "I suppose that's as good an explanation as I could come up with." His face then turned to the serious side and he said, "Your driver's license is from California, what are you doing all the way up here in Colorado Springs."

"Sunnydale California to be precise," Xander corrected bluntly, "Since my home town was blown off the map I figured it was a good time for a road trip, you know, get a feel for myself and whatnot."

"For a year and a half," Probably Daniel said skeptically.

"What can I say, I'm more complicated than I thought."

"So what made you stop in Colorado Springs?" Jack asked, as if genuinely curious. "It's not exactly a number one tourist destination."

"As I was passing through I saw a diner that was advertising the world's best hash browns," Xander answered, for once honestly. "I've been on the road for over a year and I've seen dozens of world's best hamburgers, the world's best coffee is on every other block, I've even seen the world's best Panini once, but I figured you've got to have some confidence if you are going to brag about having the world's best hash browns. They only serve them with breakfast, though, so I was going to stay at a Super 8 and try them in the morning."

"I've had them before," Daniel said with a sigh. "It turns out the world's best hash browns taste pretty much like hash browns."

"Yeah, I don't really know what I was expecting," Xander responded regretfully.

"Do you have any relatives we could contact about your situation?" Jack asked.

"You could contact Riley Finn," Xander answered hopefully.

"Do you have any RELATIVES we could contact about your situation?"

"I don't think so. Most people evacuated the town before it went under, but my father was always the tie yourself to a tree in a hurricane type of guy and my mom was always… with him. They're probably dead."

"You didn't try and get them to evacuate with you?" Daniel asked, this time showing some genuine curiosity.

"No, I barely managed to make it out myself."

"Is that how you lost your eye?" Jack asked.

"No, that happened before," Xander said, shoving down the image of the thumb coming in to eclipse his vision forever. He then put on a half-smile and said, "Don't ever bet a blind man that he can't hit the bulls-eye in darts. It's a good investment, but it's bad for your health."

Before his interrogators could respond to that, a faint knock came from the only door into the room and Jack went to answer it. Xander could hear some muffled, yet clearly passionate, discussion before Jack came back in and said, "Well it appears you are free to go Mr. Harris. The MP's outside will take you to a car which will take you to wherever you should wish to go."It was clear from his tone that he had lost whatever confrontation had just taken place and all Xander could do in that moment was sing a private song of thanks to Riley in his heart as the cuffs were taken off of him.

After watching the young man depart, Colonel Jack O'Neil burst into General Hammond's office. He was closely followed by Dr. Jackson who, while trying to persuade his colleague to behave reasonably, seemed no less frustrated. "Why'd you order us to cut him loose?" Jack demanded, paying no heed to the General's current preoccupation with a phone call.

"Something's come up, I'll have to call you back, Arthur," General Hammond muttered into the receiver before slowly lowering it down onto its dock and turning to the two men. "What can I do for you gentlemen?"

"We were finally starting to get somewhere with the Harris kid, why'd you end it so soon?" Daniel said, repeating his friend's request in a slightly less excited tone.

"I had a couple people look up that Riley fellow the kid mentioned. After all, we are in the same military. That's what we're supposed to do, talk to each other about things when we might have accidentally arrested one of our allies," Hammond responded, clearly no more happy about the current situation than his subordinates. "The thing is as soon as we gave the name and description to that Riley kid he hung up. Then twenty minutes later I get a call from the Secretary of Defense and he tells me to stand down. He said that he appreciates our work with the gate and everything, but we should keep our focus on the gate and not look into things which have nothing to do with us."

"Did you tell him about what we saw?" Daniel asked incredulously. "There's no way this kid doesn't have something to do with the Goa'uld or the NID. Not with the way he handled that situation so easily and certainly not after that interview we just had with him."

"I raised my objections," Hammond answered. "And he said that the Harris boy and whatever his business may be is none of ours. He left no room for discussion."

"Come on General, you can't expect us to just let some kid with potential connections to the rogue faction of the NID to do whatever he wants in our backyard!" Jack burst out.

"We have our orders, Jack," Hammond answered sternly. "Now, Carter is still at that exotic particles conference in Pittsburgh and Teal'c is still off world with Bra'tak. I can't send out half of SG-1 on missions, so your belated Thanksgiving break continues and you are on your own time. Furthermore, I am very busy at the moment. If any of our surveillance equipment should go missing, then I don't imagine I would have the time to look into the matter until next week."

"Thank you, George," Jack said with a nod before turning to leave.

"I don't know what you would be thanking me for, Jack,"the General said as he turned his gaze back to the paperwork on his desk.

Notes: I have this finished and am just slowly getting it polished up so I should be posting a chapter every few days. As you may have noticed I am strongly considering turning this into a series because I have some pretty detailed ideas of places I want to take these characters in the future. But I would appreciate any thoughts or feedback you may have as this is my first fanfiction ever!


	2. Chapter 2

Xander sighed. It had been two hours since he had rented a room at this affordable local motel and he had spent that entire time sitting at the room's desk chair, staring at his phone. He loved Willow, she was the closest thing he had to family now and it had been a year and a half since he had left the Scoobies. Of course he had talked to her several times since then, but it was always hard and awkward and he had never quite managed to apologize.

It was about a week after the collapse of the Hellmouth, while everyone was still taking stock of the situation and contemplating what to do next, when Xander had finally figured out his next move. Things were hard then, harder than ever, in their own way. They were trying to subtly celebrate the end of a war, which had lasted for seven years, while simultaneously comforting Buffy over her loss. And all the while, whenever he looked into the faces of his friends, their smiles, their tears, everything reminded him of her. He couldn't take it anymore, so he announced that he was leaving for parts unknown.

Giles was their father in a way, but he wasn't really. He was Buffy's father and she was their sister, or something like that. Buffy was dealing with her own things and Willow was always the closest to him through everything. She was the one, the only one who came to stop him. She asked him when he'd be coming back and he told her he might not. She got upset and, well, it wasn't her fault. He was just so angry all the time back then. If he stopped to think about it, he was still angry now, but while now his anger had been tempered into a white hot ember which kept him moving through any storm, back then it was a raging fire which licked at anyone who tried to get near.

When Willow had asked him why he had to leave he… Said some things he shouldn't have. He told her that he was alone here, that he was the only human screw up, that they didn't need him anyway. All the things he swore he never would say, everything he didn't even want to say, it came out all the same. Then he got in his car and drove away before she could persuade him not to. Ever since then things had been bad. It was all his fault, but somehow he still couldn't bring himself to apologize.

He didn't have to do this, he could just call Giles and tell him what had happened with the snake thing. Tell him to send someone to check things out and then leave in the morning. In fact, that was what he should do, just take off, leave everything to the professionals and spend his time looking for somewhere he could settle down and become normal. That was the whole point of this trip, wasn't it?

He sighed again and then picked up his phone and dialed a familiar number. "H-hey Xander, How are you? What's up?" The excited, yet nervous voice of Willow Rosenberg cut in abruptly after two rings.

"Ah, I am fine, how are you guys?" Xander said, succumbing to her awkward energy.

"We're good. Trying to create a network for coordinating the new slayerlings is busy work, but we're managing somehow," Willow answered before falling silent for a second. "You know, if you ever wanted t-. U-um So, where are you now? They got any good postcards there?"

"Only if you like looking at the same stock picture of mountains a thousand times," Xander answered, trying to force his voice to become more natural. "I'm in Colorado Springs at the moment. I was gonna just pass through, but something happened."

"Oh, did you meet someone? Is it a girl?"

"No, it was a man."

"Oh, well that's OK to. You know I always would welcome-"

"And he had a snake in his head."

"What?"

"Yeah, it was a whole thing. This guy tried to rip my head off and when it was all said and done a snake jumped out of his face and… well, tried to jump into mine. I guess it gives a whole new meaning to the phrase face to face," Xander left the explanation at that, after a couple hours of consideration he decided to leave out the part where he was kidnapped by army men. Organized military effort was a long held sore spot with the Scoobies and he didn't want to bring any unnecessary trouble to a group of men who were probably just doing their jobs. "Basically I wanted to know if that rang any bells, demonologically speaking."

"Oh, uhh, it doesn't really sound too familiar, but I'll look into it," Willow said, sounding a little disappointed.

"Thanks, you're a great help."

"Yeah… um… Xander, have you talked to Giles or Buffy at all lately?"

"N-not really since that thing in September, with all the frogs."

"Yeah, I remember. Listen, Xander, you can call even when you don't have demon stuff to do. We can just talk, I'd like that. You know, everyone's worried about you. We don't know where you are or… Just think about it."

"I will, if anything worth talking about were to ever happen to me, you'll be the first one I tell," Xander answered, making his voice a little too jovial to be quite natural. "Well, I've got to get some stuff done, so, uh… Tell the others I said hi, will you?"

"I will… I'll talk to you later."

Xander hung up the phone and then sighed again. "I'm the worst," he said quietly to himself, resting his head on the back of his chair. He sighed again for the fourth time and then got up and picked up his coat. He needed to go out somewhere, see people, not be himself for a few hours. He headed for the door of his motel room, leaving to discover what nightlife Colorado Springs had to offer.

It was about two in the morning and Jack and Daniel were still posted up in a surveillance van outside of Alexander Harris's motel room. Harris had returned from his night on the town around half an hour ago. After going to the restroom and brushing his teeth he had just spent his time sitting cross legged on his bed, whittling. "What's up with this kid?" Daniel asked, exasperated more by the length of the day he had been having than anything else.

"He's not a kid," Jack said thoughtfully, staring at the monitor which displayed the footage from the very illegal camera they had set up while Harris was out.

"What do you mean?"

"Well, obviously he's a kid, he can't be older than twenty five. He's a kid, but he's not just a kid, you know?"

"It's two in the morning, Jack. You've got to give me more to go on," Daniel said, stretching backwards only to give up halfway through and collapse into a boneless smear across his chair.

"He's not normal. He doesn't think like a normal person does."

"Yeah, his interview was weird. It made me wonder if that was what all the Goa'uld felt like whenever they tried getting information out of you."

"There's that, but that's not what I was talking about," Jack said, sitting up to search through the detritus on the floor for the one half-full cup of coffee. "Back when we first saw him, that wasn't the way a normal person reacts."

"True," Daniel observed after a moment of thought. "Sometimes I forget that ordinary people aren't put into life or death battles on a daily basis. Most people, even when given such a lucky situation, wouldn't have been able to go for the kill like that."

"He wasn't lucky, that's the most worrying thing about it all."

"What do you mean?"

"I mean what I said," Jack answered grumpily. He then turned an appraising eye on Daniel and asked, "Are you on something? You are really out of it."

"Shut up. I'm tired. And what do you mean no luck? The way I saw it the kid fell down and the snake… kind of… fell too."

"He didn't trip, he fell on purpose. You saw it too, he chose his battle field. If he wasn't absolutely sure that chair was behind him, then I'm ten years old. He used the fall to tempt the Goa'uld into action and THEN he screwed its footing at the last minute." Jack stopped talking to take a sip of coffee and then returned his eyes to the monitors. "Whoever, whatever that kid is, he is used to fighting, real fighting, against stronger enemies where he had to use the environment and enemy psychology to his advantage."

"So what is the point of this whole thesis, Jack?" Daniel asked, derisively. "Are you trying to say he's a member of the sticks and stones army?"

"I'm saying you are a pompous ass I should have left in the desert," Jack answered half-heartedly. "and yes, he's not just a person of interest, or the secretary of defense's son, he's a soldier. And he sure as hell isn't just some college dropout from Sunnydale, California!"

"Are you saying that should be enough evidence to persuade Hammond to disobey his direct orders?" Daniel asked skeptically.

"No, I'm just saying that I want to know what the hell is going on with this! I mean, look at him, LOOK at him right now."

"I'm looking," Daniel said, leaning forward to take a quick peek at the monitor before laying back again and closing his eyes. "He's sharpening a stick."

Jack sighed meaningfully and said, "He can't sleep."

Daniel tried to process this, as if it had anything to do with anything, before giving up and asking, "What?"

"Don't you recognize it? We all get like that, when the world feels like it's against us or we can't quite come back from a tense battle. We all have our things. You read the same passage over and over again and do other nerdy stuff. Carter fiddles with whatever is in front of her and then goes off to eat the sleeve of Oreos, you know, the one she thinks we don't know she takes on every mission. Teal'c, well, sits, but in a slightly more concerned way. And I, I service my weapon. He is servicing his weapon."

"He's sharpening a stick, Jack," Daniel responded, not bothering to open his eyes.

"Exactly," Jack replied meaningfully. "Just look at him and say I'm wrong."

Daniel sat up again and took a closer look. The boy was moving his hands in a rhythmic, repetitive motion which seemed to sync up with his breath. All the while, his eye seemed to be supervising his hands, but it had no focus. "Ok, he's a soldier. What are you going to do about it?"

"I'm going to find out what war he's fighting."

"Right now I think we're both fighting the same war, the only difference is that he's winning and I'm giving up now," Daniel observed, exhaustedly before closing his eyes to fall asleep.

It had been three days since Xander had his run in with the nice folks from the U.S. armed forces and he had made basically zero progress in his research. The biggest problem was the surveillance. He hadn't exactly seen or heard them or anything, but he knew there had to be something. After such incidents, the civil authorities would always release him, but they rarely gave up on watching him, if for no other reason than to put pressure on him so that he would leave town. He didn't imagine that the army was going to be any less persistent. Regardless of whether he could confirm their presence, the mere possibility of their surveillance kept him from going to anywhere useful.

If he walked into a demon bar at the wrong time and ran into one of those young bucks that seemed to think that the lone Scooby makes an easy target, then he could accidentally get whoever was watching him involved in the ensuing tussle. He couldn't afford to bring any uninvolved people into their world, even more so if they were military types. Best case scenario they misunderstand their first demon for a poor sap with a skin condition and summarily execute Xander for beheading him. In the worst case, they could recognize everything and decide to be helpful.

As he wandered aimlessly down the streets of Colorado Springs, internally bemoaning his situation, his phone began to ring. Looking at the caller ID, it was Willow. "What's up? Got something for me?" He asked hopefully.

"Um... Kind of," Willow answered uncertainly.

"What does that mean?"

"Well, I've looked into it and there are a bunch of different supernatural worms and snakes which burrow into the human body, it gives me chills just thinking about them all, but I wasn't able to find a lot of good candidates that match your description... Unless..." Willow paused and then restarted with the authority of someone who was reading from a text. "Did it have the wings of both a chicken and a raven and the bearing of a devourer of worlds?"

"Nope, no wings, and I didn't see it eat anything, so I can't really say about the second part."

"Ok, well, that's a relief. This things looks not of the good," Willow responded seriously. "Other than that I've found some really vague descriptions which seem to match what you encountered, but they're all from ancient Egypt, so they aren't the most reliable things in the world."

"Well, if it's our only lead we don't have much of a choice at the moment, do we?"

"Yeah," Willow answered before awkwardly transitioning straight into a lecture. "The sources say they ruled over Egypt several millennia ago, making them build the pyramids, enslaving people, all that stuff. Then, after a while people got fed up and rebelled, burying their portal and kicking them off the planet."

"Portal? So they are from another dimension like those things that Glory summoned?"

"That seems to be the best explanation I can come up with."

"Which means this can be anything from a novice's spell gone wrong to a full-blown invasion. This seems like it will be really troublesome. Does it say anything about how to kill them?"

"There are mentions of them using amazing powers to protect themselves from attacks and heal from injuries, but it seems that if you can cause very much damage to their real body, they will die. As far as killing them but leaving the host alive, the outlook seems grim. Seems any attempts at removing or damaging the parasite will kill the host."

"That's too bad," Xander said, privately feeling a little relieved that he hadn't killed that man for nothing. "What about finding them or this portal, any clues?"

"None as of yet, but I'll try and figure something out. Are you going to need any back up for this? We could send someone, or you know..."

"No, that's fine," Xander answered quickly. "At the moment I'm doing nothing much and based on how the last one was acting, whatever is going on in this town, I don't feel like it's a super coordinated attempt to take over the world or anything." Xander was going to leave it at this, but suddenly the image of a much darker version of his childhood friend flashed through his mind and he added, "Don't work yourself too hard on this."

"I should be telling you that, Mr. I Can Do Everything Myself," Willow answered in a huff. "Oh, sorry, I've got to go, but seriously, don't do anything too rash without talking to us first."

"OK, I'll talk to you later," Xander answered with a light chuckle before hanging up. With that he thought he should return to his hotel and review the limited information he had been able to collect about the incident and the host of the snake.

Before he could turn around, however, his vision went dark. For half a second he was stunned and when he had come to his senses, two pairs of hands were already dragging him somewhere. He struggled viciously, surprising the men who had him, and managed to get one of his hands free from their grasp. He desperately flailed his free arm around until he felt himself come in contact with something that seemed like hair. He grabbed and pulled whatever it was connected to towards his head, striking them together. He saw stars, but two of the hands let go of him. Before he could mount his attack on the other man, however, he felt an annoyingly familiar pain spread throughout his body and he lost consciousness.

When Xander came to, he was staring at a slab of concrete. He tried to ignore his splitting headache and took inventory of his body parts. Everything seemed there, but there was something binding his wrists. When he decided he couldn't avoid it any more, he raised his head and saw exactly what he expected and dreaded. Of course he was in a drab concrete room, with his hands tied to a pillar. He had more experience than he would care to admit at being kidnapped, but each time had it's own flavor to it.

"Alexander Harris, correct?" A voice called arrogantly as two men stepped out from Xander's blind spot. Their clean and organized appearances mixed with the loose, urban clothing just screamed, 'I'm trying too hard at the secret part of secret agent.'

As the two men approached him with vague menace, all Xander could think was, "thank god no one seems to want to lay eggs in me this time." In response to their provocation, he took a deep breath, smiled showily and said, "When welcoming guests it is customary to offer a beverage. I read that somewhere."

"Sorry, we're all out of milk and cookies," One of the men answered condescendingly as he leaned down to eclipse Xander's vision.

It bothered Xander a little that he couldn't see what the second man was doing, but he forced the smile harder to keep this from showing on his face. Then he said, "Well, I'm not all that thirsty anyway... So you guys army men too, cause that would get a little redundant."

"I would like to ask you some questions," the man replied, not even acknowledging Xander's overt attempts at information gathering. "You killed a man in broad daylight this week, were arrested by the military, and subsequently released without any charges. Wouldn't you classify that as a massive miscarriage of justice? How did you work that out?"

Xander thought for a moment and then leaned forward conspiratorially, "I've been told that I have a certain brand of personal charm."

"That's cute," The man Xander was thinking of as the lead interrogator commented as he leaned back and accepted something from the other man. Xander couldn't quite make out what it was in the gloom, but the interrogator held it intimidatingly as he asked, "What relationship do you have with the SGC?"

Xander thought for a moment to see if he knew even a bit of what this guy was talking about. Finding nothing he answered, "I think I had an email through them a few years back."

"That's SBC," the second man observed quietly, before turning an embarrassed look to his colleague as if it had been unintentional.

The interrogator shook his head to himself before nodding towards Xander meaningfully. The second man slowly walked forward and brought up a pair of scissors, cutting Xander's plain white tee shirt down the middle, exposing his bare chest and abdomen. "I'll ask again, What is your relationship with the SGC?" As he spoke he knelt down next to where Xander was on the floor.

Xander could now make out the pair of alligator clips which the man held in his hands. Xander had made a mistake there, he thought, the man wasn't an interrogator, he was a torturer. Xander really had nothing to give this man. He knew nothing, but even if he did he probably wouldn't want to talk to someone like this. Only one thing left to do then, Xander steeled his resolve as best he could before saying, "Would you classify your mother as more fat, stupid, or slutty? I guess she could be all three, but that would be kinda gr-AAHHHHHHH!"

He was interrupted as the torturer clamped the alligator clips on either side of his chest and pain was sent through them across his whole body. He convulsed uncontrollably and his body felt like he was burning from the inside out. The torturer removed the clamps and commanded, "Tell me what you know."

"Ok, ok," Xander said in as placating a tone as he could manage through his wheezes. "You need a flux capacitor and then you need to get up to 88 miles per hour, that's all I know."

At this the torturer seemed genuinely confused and the second man slowly elucidated. "He's talking about Back to the Future... It's a movie from the eighties."

As the torturer turned back to Xander, cold anger covering his face, Xander could only think, "I might be very stupid."

Notes: I appreciate everyone's reviews. I know that a lot of this chapter took a more serious turn, but I felt it was important for the development of the characters and the plot. I promise there will be more comedy & action in the upcoming chapters! If you can please take the time to let me know your thoughts.


	3. Chapter 3

After observing Alexander Harris for three days, Colonel O'Neil was getting pretty close to his deadline without much progress. SG-1 was an important resource to the SGC and couldn't be out of commission for long. Carter had returned from her conference and, after some convincing, had skeptically agreed to helping in his little surveillance project. It was good to have the help, but he knew that when Teal'c returned on Sunday, he would have to leave the matter unresolved unless he could produce some form of evidence of the Harris boy's allegiance to the NID or some darker force.

Even he had started to feel like he couldn't play civilian for much longer when it happened. Harris had been talking with someone who seemed like a comrade. Jack had really wanted to get some feeling of what they were talking about, but for some reason whenever they tried to tap his phone the connection would go crazy and then just fizzle out. Jack was just about ready to put on a cap and glasses and attempt some old school eavesdropping when a van pulled up behind the youth. It shouldn't have been too alerting, but it gave Jack a bad feeling. As he got out of his own van to get a closer look, two men stepped out of the car and put a bag over Harris' head and proceeded to kidnap him.

The whole event was so unexpected that Jack's instinct to draw and intervene weren't able to kick in before the van's door was already closed and it was driving off. "Shit," Jack cursed under his breath, as he ran back to his own vehicle and leapt into the back. "Follow them!" He shouted, not having time to revel in this cliched development.

"Already on it," Carter called from the driver's seat, shifting her weight from the break to the gas.

What followed was a very low speed chase. In theory whoever took Harris didn't know about the surveillance. Otherwise, they simply didn't care. Either way, following them back to an abandoned, half constructed building on the edge of town was a simple matter.

As they drove, Jack was uncharacteristically quiet, ignoring Daniel and Carter's attempts at conversation. He was too focused on the events of the past several days. What was supposed to be a relaxing, if delayed, Thanksgiving holiday had morphed into the clumsiest and least productive game of spy vs spy seen outside the pages of Mad Magazine.

He just couldn't quite get a handle on what was happening. In theory, Alexander Harris could really just be some drifter with a bad personality and the worst luck in the world. That possibility seemed slimmer every passing second, but it was still possible. It was also possible that Harris was the only competent agent of the NID either the legitimate or illegitimate sides, and this was all some convoluted plot to overtake the SGC or something. That didn't feel right at all, though. Then there was the third option, that he was something... else. The leader of the sticks and stones army.

When they had arrived and were idling on the street a few blocks away from their target, Carter turned to Jack and asked, "What do we do now?"

"That's right," Jack thought at his sub ordinate's gentle prodding. "It doesn't matter what is happening, there's really only one thing to do."

"We go in there and take everyone in for questioning and/or their own protection," Jack answered with a smile.

"I don't think Hammond would agree it's that simple," Carter commented nervously.

"That's why we won't tell him," Jack replied as if this was completely natural. "Now then, back to base. We need supplies."

"How pragmatic," Daniel observed with a sigh.

They wasted no time in returning to base and sneaking into the armory to steal a zat for each of them and some flak jackets. Never the less, it took several hours and the sun was already setting by the time they returned to the hideout. Briefly Jack considered waiting for another hour or so to give themselves a firm cover of darkness, but then his conscience kicked in. If that Harris kid really turned out to habitually be in the wrong place at the wrong time, or at least one of the good guys, then making him stay in there any longer was inexcusable.

"We're going in now," Jack said resignedly as their car pulled to a stop near the decrepit building.

"I figured as much," Daniel said, unstrapping himself and stepping out of the car.

"Obviously," Carter said, putting on her vest. She had a more anxious energy about her than the other two. It made sense, she believed in her companion's stories, but she had only seen Harris walking around being a normal kid of his age. Well, normal drifter of his age... ish. Either way she couldn't abide by letting him stay in the hands of whoever had captured him, it was against her principles.

"You know, he still could be working with them," Daniel cautioned quietly as the three approached their destination.

"I know that, but it doesn't make any difference. If he's working with them than we just knock him out and lock him up, saying that we are worried he might be attacked again." Jack replied calmly.

"Yes, I guess there is always the 'I didn't know any better,' approach to avoiding Court Marshal," Daniel observed snidely.

"We're close, quiet," Carter chastised and they all fell silent.

They snuck through what was probably going to be a door that was never quite added and drew their Zat'nik'tels, anticipating trouble. They found it soon enough, as a short balding man stepped out into the corridor in front of them, yawning. His eyes met Jack's and he hesitated for half a heartbeat, before tearing at his clothes in search of a weapon as he backpedaled furiously and screamed to his comrades. This response was the complete opposite of what Jack had expected and the blast of blue lighting he had sent at the man dissipated harmlessly on wall.

The three pursued the enemy as quickly as they dared, but when they rounded the corner, the man was nowhere to be seen and a few voices could be heard arguing in the distance. The team tried to follow the sounds, but they kept getting farther away. Then they heard a car start up and drive off.

"Did they really just leave like that?" Carter asked skeptically.

"That doesn't seem like the NID, it must be some sort of trap. Be careful," Jack cautioned before slowing down to start investigating the side rooms along the hallway.

Most of the building seemed abandoned, but they eventually came upon a room that showed signs of life. There were some signs of hurried clean up, with miscellaneous equipment and papers strewn across the floor. Overall the room gave the distinct feeling of quick flight, taking only what you could grab. As Jack crept through the room, he felt something bounce off his questing foot. He stooped down to pick it up and found it to be a small digital video camera. Finding it on the floor, he had the feeling that the residents had dropped it in their hurry to escape and he pocketed it, as much out of curiosity as anything else.

That was as much investigation he could allow himself at the moment though, and he signaled his team forward. There was no hope of catching up to the the fleeing car at this point. However, based on how quickly whoever it was had taken off after seeing him, there was no way they would be able to force an unwilling victim into a car that quickly, even if he were unconscious. Assuming Harris hadn't been working with the NID, which Jack found increasingly unlikely, he was still in the building, they just had to find him.

A task that actually turned out to be easier done than said. Two rooms down from the base of operations, the team found a room which stood out from all the others in that it still had a door. "Just screams, 'I'm trapped in a warehouse,' doesn't it?", Jack observed as Carter checked the handle.

"Sometimes, cliches exist for a reason," Daniel observed, taking up a position on the opposite side of the door.

Jack felt like retorting, but he held his tongue as Carter carefully swung the door open and the team rushed inside. As expected, it was empty save for one solitary man, tied to a column in the center of the room. What wasn't expected, was the state he was in. The boy was slumped in on himself, his clothes were torn, and blood was running from his mouth, down his chest to form a small pool on the floor. As the team looked him over, Daniel cursed under his breath and Carter slowly started forward to look over the poor boy.

For some reason, something didn't fell quite right about the whole situation to Jack though, and he held out an arm to stop Carter's advance. That was when he really perceived the thing that was giving him pause, the kid's eye-patch was missing and, as he looked closer, he could see a faint glint near his right hand. "There's no reason not to be cautious," Jack thought and he raised his zat to point it at the seemingly defenseless boy.

Before his subordinates could question Jack's decision, the boy heard the sound of the weapon readying itself and raised his head to look. His eye was clear and he simply said, "Oh, you got to be fucking kidding me." before Jack pulled the trigger and he was rendered truly unconscious.

"Even if he was awake, you didn't need to shoot him," Carter protested as Jack moved towards the boy.

He said nothing and merely knelt down to examine the kid's hands. The ropes that were supposed to be binding his hands had been cut and lazily draped back around his wrists and in his right hand there was... Jack picked up the strange object and looked it over for a few seconds before properly identifying it. It was the boy's eye-patch, but it had been crumpled down, as if crushed in a fist, and from inside the cloth that would cover his eye there emerged a small knife. Jack held up the weapon for his colleagues to see and said, "It pays to be cautious."

After finding Harris, they reported back to the SGC and took the boy into their protection for the time being. At least that was what they were calling it. Even after giving him that convenient excuse to lock the kid up, it still took hours for General Hammond to be satisfied with his "surveillance does not equal breach and clear" lecture.

Once things had settled down and the boy had been shackled to a bed in the infirmary, Jack had retired to his room on the base and retrieved the camera he had confiscated from the kidnapper's base. His curiosity kept him from giving it to the men who were left to investigate the other papers and objects found at the building. With nothing better to do, he removed the memory card from the camera and hooked it up to his computer.

After about an hour of watching the tape, someone knocked on his door twice before opening it without even waiting for a response. "Hey, Jack, want to go grab some dinner?" Daniel asked nonchalantly as he walked in.

"No, I've lost my appetite pretty thoroughly," Jack answered dazedly, without even turning to look at Daniel. "Instead of that, come over here and look at this."

"What's up?" Daniel asked, stepping over to look over Jack's shoulder at the computer screen as he rewound through the video he was playing.

"Just watch this part, it bothers me." Jack responded, gesturing towards the screen.

As Jack pressed play on the video, to show a full screen of Alexander Harris convulsing under electric shock, Daniel jerked back on impulse, saying, "What the hell are you trying to show me, Jack!?"

"Just watch," Jack said, grabbing Daniel by the arm and pulling him back over. "It comes up in a bit."

Daniel couldn't help but go along with Jack's insistence and turned his attention back to the screen. As he watched, the current was removed from the kid's chest and a male voice angrily asked, "Are you ready to talk?"

"You know, the fact that you haven't gotten even one of my references makes me question your life. What have you done wrong to not even have seen Star Wars?" Harris responded in a weak tone that otherwise showed no awareness of his situation.

"This isn't working," a second faceless voice said nervously.

"You're right. Get me the pliers," the first voice responded menacingly.

There was some shuffling as one of the men left the room and then Harris turned his attention to an area a little to the left of the camera. Looking into his eye gave Daniel a chill, it wasn't the joking look he had seen the kid wear before and it showed no signs of fear. The closest thing Daniel could think of to describe the look was disdain. Then, Harris started to speak, "You know you are really bad at this. Torture is all about making me fear you more than I would fear God himself. That's the only way to get real reliable information, and you, you don't even know what fear is. I have met nightmares, and you are not one of them."

The next thirty seconds was dominated by silence, but the torturer seemed to recover when his assistant re-entered the room. There were some faint metallic noises as the he must have received the pliers before stepping in front of the camera and saying, "Yeah, well, we'll see how long you can keep that opinion."

At this, Jack stopped the video and turned to Daniel, his eyes questioning. "This wasn't the first time he was tortured..." Daniel observed slowly. "It wasn't even the fifth time... He was like you, but... well, more eloquent. He's supposed to be less than thirty years old. Even we weren't that screwed up back then, right?"

Jack didn't respond and just turned his attention back to the screen. He could barely see Harris' face through the crook of his torturer's arm. All he could do in that moment was ask himself the same question he had been asking for the last three days.

For the third time in less than a week, Xander found himself creeping back to consciousness in an unfamiliar place. As his wits came back to him, he quickly grabbed control of his body and kept himself from showing any unnecessary signs of his consciousness. Every time he thought about it he couldn't help but bemoan the fact that he had developed an SOP for kidnapping, but now that it was part of his life he could do nothing but accept it.

He felt like every type of hell rolled into one, but his muscles were listening to him and that was something. If he couldn't deal with pain like this, then he wouldn't have made one of his major hobbies in high-school being thrown into walls. He gently cracked his eye open and did his best to emulate tossing and turning as he surveyed the room. He found himself laying on a bed with railings in a concrete room that was covered in blinking equipment, tubes, and various containers of various chemicals, each of which presumably had some medical use... hopefully. It seemed like a hospital, but lacked the overwhelmingly bleached feeling of every hospital room he had been in. In that case maybe infirmary would be the best word to describe the room. For the moment, this at least seemed like an improvement on his previous situation.

He shifted his body again, but his right arm didn't quite follow him. It was caught in something and as he paid more attention, he could hear a faint metallic jingling as he moved. He was handcuffed to the bed, that was a decided decline in his situation. He took a second look around the room and saw a lone woman who seemed like a doctor sitting at a desk in the corner. She hadn't looked up at him yet, so he could only assume she was already used to his restlessness from when he was legitimately unconscious. "A doctor should be good," he thought hopefully. "It's about time I got some attention."

With that thought, he started to groan as painfully, pitifully as possible. It wasn't exactly acting, as much as letting loose all his body's pent up complaints and it wasn't long before it had the desired results.

The doctor rushed over quickly and asked, "Are you all right?" worriedly as she bent slightly to look him over. In response, Xander let out another groan and shifted restlessly. "I'll get a sedative," she said after looking over his anguished face.

She rushed over to a cabinet along the wall and quickly came back with a syringe full of sedative. She approached the bed and started to wrestle with the IV line, but before she could inject anything, Xander was on her. She was completely surprised, but even if she wasn't, she was no fighter. He grabbed hold of the arm with the syringe and wrapped his other arm around her throat.

When she stopped struggling, he counted his heartbeats till he got to thirty, just to make sure she was properly unconscious, and then released her onto the bed beside him. Then he took the syringe, which he had secured from her, and started shoving it's tip into the keyhole of his restraints. After several failed attempts and almost stabbing himself three times, he managed to liberate himself.

The newly freed Xander explored the room and found there to only be one exit, which he was sure was guarded by a pair of unfairly large men. After some thought he scrounged together some surgical tubing and tied it in front of the door about halfway up his shin. Then he picked up a beaker and stood to the right of the doorway. He took four deep breaths before throwing the beaker against the opposite wall.

The guard's reactions were commendably fast. Less than four seconds later, the door was pulled open and an intimidating man was rushing through it yelling something like "Whats going on?" Of course his intimidating air didn't last long as his leg got caught in the tubing and he immediately fell flat on his face, the damage received multiplied significantly by his hurry.

The second guard was a bit quicker on his feet and was able to almost completely avoid the trap. After crossing the threshold, he keenly turned to examine the rest of the room before addressing his fallen companion. This was as far as he got, however, as Xander was prepared for this and had thrown himself at the guard, sending his elbow into the guard's neck. There was a disturbingly clear crack as the man's head hit the opposite wall and he collapsed into a pile at Xander's feet.

Xander then turned to the first guard, who was still trying to make a compromise between pushing himself to his feet and drawing his weapon. Before he could properly do either, Xander put a foot in the small of the man's back, knelt on the back of his neck, and swiped away the strangely shaped gun the guard was reaching for in one smooth motion. As the guard below him sputtered into unconsciousness, Xander examined his new weapon. It looked the same as whatever the colonel had shot him with back when he had been rescued from one kidnapping into another.

The design of the weapon was surprisingly sleek with one just two buttons resting on the otherwise unblemished surface which seemed to be modeled into the shape of a snake, or perhaps a scorpion's tail. As he held it aloft, he pressed one of the buttons and the gun reared up as it had for the colonel before. He then experimentally pressed the other and fell over in surprise, as a streak of blue lightning shot out of the tip of the gun and dissipated across the room's ceiling.

After recovering from the shock, he looked down at the weapon and thought about what had happened before. It was all a little hazy, but he had definitely been shot with one of these things, which meant they were non-lethal, since he was still alive. As the reality of the situation sunk in all he could do was weakly voice his jumbled thoughts to himself, "I have an Egyptian phaser... This is the coolest thing that has ever happened to me."

As the nearly orgasmic sense of self satisfaction faded, the reality of "trapped in giant concrete prison," flooded back in to fill the void. He quickly got to his feet and left the infirmary behind. As he ran through the maze of corridors, he "stunned" every person he ran across. This was the only strategy he could really come up with considering he didn't know anything that was going on at this point and what side was what. It was the best idea he could come up with, but still absolutely terrible. It didn't take long for alarms to sound and the generally relaxed staff in the hallway, to be replaced with people who had a more seek and destroy feel to them.

He had no idea where he was or where he was going, but when he came across a large half-open blast door his thoughts ran down the line of "sturdy door equals exit," and he rushed through it. What he found on the other side, however, wasn't brisk mountain air or the welcoming light of day. Instead, he found himself standing in the middle of a concrete room which was dominated by a large metal disk, the edge of which was covered in arcane symbols. As he stared up at it in confusion, a new alarm started to sound and orange lights around the room started to flash. He was immediately brought back to reality and turned to search for a path to escape.

Before Xander could make any moves towards flight, the room was suddenly flooded with an army of very alert and very armed soldiers all of whom were pointing their guns at him. Xander swallowed hard as he held his hands up and slowly backed away from their imposing presence. Dozens of possible futures were running through his head, and none of them seemed particularly pleasant.

As Xander tried to recover from this hopeless situation, he heard a monstrous roar from behind him which demanded his attention. When he had turned around, the center of the metallic disk was spinning away and revealing a light blue wall of what seemed to be standing water. At this point, he was just confused. Without any lead or path to follow, he could do nothing but stand there, staring at the ring.

That was when three new soldiers came through the wall of water at a dead run, stopping at the base of the ramp below it to turn around and point their own weapons back at the water that had just produced them. It was then that Xander decided that the soldiers weren't there for him, and it would be best for him to get the hell out of there before he found out what they were waiting for. As he was slowly turning away from the ring to put his new and complicated plan of just running away into action, his entire vision went white and his face suddenly felt like it had taken a trip to the surface of the sun. This froze him in place as he listened to the the world explode around him. When his vision returned, he looked back towards the water ring and saw what had just passed in front of him. It must have been one of the dozens of little yellow spears of light which were coming out of the water all around him. At that point he gave up. In favor of keeping his body free from having holes the size of a fist punched right through it, he sank down onto the floor and just lay there, not even bothering to move when the surrounding guards turned their attentions to him.

"What do you think?" General Hammond asked, staring through the one-way mirror at the disgruntled youth who was sitting at an otherwise empty table.

"I think he was pretty well shocked by the gate," Sam Carter observed.

"I think he looks grumpy," Daniel commented thoughtfully. "You aren't supposed to look grumpy when being held by the US government. It's one of the rules."

Silence dominated the small observation room as the three of them turned to look at Jack, who refused to acknowledge their gazes as he studied the boy in the other room. After about a minute of this, Jack finally said, "We've been observing him for days and all that we are finding are more questions... I think I'm gonna try talking to him now."

"I'll go with you," Daniel said, moving to follow Jack out the door.

At this, Jack stopped for a second before saying, "No, I think I should go in alone."

"I suppose that's fair," Daniel responded. "He is like a little pirate version of you."

Jack grunted distractedly in response, as he tried to come up with his approach. He then left the observation room and turned to step into the interrogation room for the second time in a week. "How are you feeling? You've been through a lot over the past few days."

"The concern is a little unconvincing coming from the man who kidnapped me... twice," Harris answered irritably. His attitude was completely different from the last interrogation, and he lacked all the bravado and cold anger he had shown in the video. He just seemed... petulant, it would have even been a little cute if he were fifteen years younger.

"Brought in for questioning, and protective custody," Jack answered, holding up a finger for each. "No kidnapping."

"Semantics," Harris answered moodily. He then seemed to think of something else and his expression soured further as he grumbled. "Three times in five days. It's a record even for me... It's like I'm growing up into Princess Peach or something..."

As the boy in front of him descended into inaudible grumbling, Jack decided to try and change the pace a little. "Listen, Alex"

Before Jack could continue his thought, however, the boy's head shot up and he said, "Xander."

"Sorry, Alexander," Jack said trying to start again.

"No, just Xander," the boy corrected once again.

"Alright, X-" Jack started for the third time before he actually processed the word he was about to say and he said,"Wait, really? Xander? Why?"

"Why not?" The boy answered in mock defense.

"Oh, don't give me that. There has to be a story there."

The newly named Xander seemed to think about this for a moment before holding out his hand and saying, "Twenty bucks."

"What?"

"Give me twenty bucks and I'll tell you why," Xander answered, his face lightening somewhat. "Or you could always agree to release me, but I don't see that happening, so, twenty bucks."

"I'm not paying you," Jack responded after taking a few seconds to see if he was really being extorted in an officially unofficial interview.

"Then you'll never know," Xander answered with a grin. "Not knowing will eat away at you every day from now on, until one dark night, when the curiosity gets too much and you can't help but track me down or go insane. Then... you'll give me twenty dollars."

"Your elementary school teachers said you had problems with authority figures, didn't they?"

"Maybe, maybe not. You can know for just twenty dollars."

"Is that your going rate for information?"

"For now it is, but who knows how long it'll last. Gotta always been considering the changing cost of living and whatnot. You should act fast while supplies last."

With that, Jack took out his wallet and placed a twenty on the table. "Then can you tell me why you hold yourself like a soldier?"

Xander just looked down at the money before moving his gaze back up to Jack's eyes and rebutting, "Can you tell me why you have a hole in the space time continuum in your basement?"

"I want to remind you who is being interrogated here, but I don't feel like that would help all that much," Jack answered with a sigh.

Xander just stared back at Jack, his slightly jovial expression slowly souring once again. As he watched Xander, Jack remembered what the kid had been through in the last 24 hours and sighed again. The kid had been so rambunctious, what with knocking nearly a fifth of the base unconscious, that he had completely forgotten about the pain that the boy must have still been feeling. Put in that context, his being able to carry on this lively of a conversation at all was impressive... Jack sighed again. "Listen, I really don't think you have anything to do with us, right?"

"That's what I've been trying to tell everyone, though apparently, not very convincingly."

"I believe you have nothing to do with us, yet..." Jack started again before letting his thoughts collapse once again. "I am old, but I am still a soldier. In fact, I'd say I was a pretty good one, after all I spend about as much time rolling around in the dirt as I do walking on top of it."

For the first time Xander looked at Jack with an expression which Jack logged as genuine puzzlement, but he didn't interrupt and Jack slowly meandered on. "You are a civilian and I am a soldier, but I really think you are better at fighting than I am. At least in a melee. Why is that? That's all I want to know right now. You don't learn to fight like that unless you experience real combat. What are your experiences?"

"So you're trying to say that you really only want to satisfy your curiosity?"

"Yes."

"And then we'll be done?"

Jack simply nodded at him, confident that Hammond would back up his promise... fairly confident. Xander looked across the table at Jack ponderously and silence reigned once again. That continued for several minutes until Xander suddenly opened his mouth to speak. "I won't tell you other people's secrets." With just that, Jack had all but given up on getting anything when Xander continued. "But, I'll tell you mine... and the government's, cause screw them."

Jack wasn't quite sure how to answer this, so all he said was, "Yeah?"

"Well, not that I don't have my conditions," Xander answered with a smile. "Firstly, I will trust you for now, but I don't trust your boss, or his boss, and I sure as hell don't trust the pentagon. I'll talk to you, alone, in a place of my choosing."

Jack only took a second to consider this before agreeing. Then Xander continued. "Secondly, I expect an equivalent exchange. I will tell you my secrets and the government's, if you will tell me yours, and the government's. That's the deal."

Jack was stopped dead at that. He had no idea what his commander would say to this little exchange, but he was certain it would be negative. "You're asking a lot from me here. I can tell you whatever you want from my life or whatever, but classified is classified."

"Oh, come on, Jack. I've already seen enough here, that if this was a spy movie I wouldn't make it through this sentence alive, unless my last name was bond," Xander responded, quickly cutting through Jack's defense. "All I want is for you to fill in the holes. Really it would be better for you to just tell me, cause otherwise I'll probably end up snooping around and you won't have any control over the flow of information... At least that's what you can tell your boss as justification." He said all this with a smile, but Jack was certain the last part was more than just a convenient excuse.

After thinking it over a bit more, Jack answered simply, "I guess there's no way around it." With that he stood up and led Xander out of the room. As he passed the observation room, Hammond and his teammates emerged and moved as if to stop him. Jack merely brushed passed them and they didn't quite have the fortitude to follow. With that little show of force, Xander's mood seemed to have brightened a little and he smiled all the way to Jack's truck.


	4. Chapter 4

On the ride to wherever they were going, Xander didn't say much save for where to turn. When Xander finally motioned for Jack to park, they were sitting in front of an old-fashioned looking dinner. The front window held a faded sign which read "Home of the world's best hash-browns." Jack shook his head, but said nothing as Xander led him inside and they found a seat.

"The hash-browns here really aren't all that special, but the eggs are good and that's all that really matters." With this, a friendly waitress came to take their orders and Xander said, "I'll take twenty bucks worth of eggs and coffee, thanks." He ended this with a charming smile Jack didn't quite think should be possible with an eye-patch. Jack just shook his head again and ordered a burger and fries and the woman left.  
>Outside the oppressive atmosphere of the base, Xander's energy seemed to be returning as he started getting very... chatty, very quickly. "You know why we color eggs at Easter?" The boy asked with an excited twist of the head.<p>

Before Jack could answer, Xander continued. "Eggs are like rocks that turn into living things. It makes them a great symbol of rejuvenation and life... Absorbing the power of something so connected to rebirth after awaking from the temporary death of sleep, makes for a really symbolic breakfast, don't you think?"

"It's five thirty... pm."

"Yes, well, Breakfast is always best at night."

"You sound like a ten year old."

"I try." Xander answered with a grin. Then he scrunched up his face and said, "Right, so, you want to know about stuff and junk." Jack simply raised his eyebrows at this, in his best impression of Teal'c, as he attempted to remain passive. He didn't know what the kid was gearing up to tell him, but he didn't want to get in the way. After a few seconds, Xander continued. "I'm trying to come up with how to make things make sense all at once and... OK, so, scientists say that the universe is actually a lot of different little universes all wrapped up into one... That's always made me a bit confused because the universe is defined as being everything in existence, so if there are other universes, wouldn't they just be another part of the capitol 'u' Universe?"

"If you're talking about multiple dimensions, I'm a little familiar with the subject," Jack responded, remembering the scene as monster caterpillars and giant dragonflies terrorized Colorado Springs.

"Right, and in theory anything that could exist somewhere does exist in one of those infinite dimensions," Xander added, recovering from his moment of whimsy. "So, in theory, one of those infinite dimensions is hell... actually, more than one. Does that make sense?"

"What kind of hell?"

"Like the one with the fire, and the brimstones as well."

"This is suddenly not sounding like science."

"It is, in theory, completely scientific," Xander rebutted, looking at Jack expectantly.

Xander was clearly waiting for Jack to accept that. He spent a while staring into Xander's eye and he saw nothing but seriousness in the kid's gaze. As a man who had fought aliens based on the gods of ancient Egypt by going through a wormhole in Colorado, he had no right to be too picky about physics and reason. "OK, in theory that's true... what about it?"

"Well, if there was a way for things from that dimension to get into this dimension... that would be bad, right?" Xander then stopped and seemed to hesitate over the next part. "Well, there is- was one in Sunnydale."

"One what?"

"A portal connecting Sunnydale to... Hell. Kind of like in Doom, but not on Mars and not man made."

"So... the town was attacked by demons? Is that where this is going?"

"Yes... kind of all the time, really."

Jack was a heartbeat away from dismissing the whole thing as a joke and taking Xander back for some punitive protective custody, when the thought 'ancient aliens' flashed through his mind. He made himself take a deep breath and very measuredly said, "So, you are... a demon hunter?"

"Well hunter makes it sound like we ran around the country looking for demons and killing them. We just, kinda, got rid of things that were eating people in town or... you know, trying to blow up the world."

"You saved the world?" Jack asked skeptically

"Me personally, not all that often, but I helped most of the time."

"People would know," Jack couldn't help saying as he pictured fiery holes being torn in the streets and pitchfork wielding monsters pouring out of them.

"By all rights they should by now," Xander answered slowly. "But they don't want to. The adults, authority figures, the police... Someone in Sunnydale should have realized that roving gangs on PCP don't grow four inch long fangs and run around exsanguinating people in thirty seconds flat, but they didn't... They didn't realize it, because realizing it would be too spooky."

"Then what made you notice?"

"My friend died, and then he tried to kill me... Which sucked."

"I'm sorry," Jack said slowly, knowing exactly what that felt like and knowing that he could say nothing that would soften it at all.

"The past is the past, that's the right cliche, right?" Xander responded dismissively as he turned an excessively exuberant smile towards the encroaching plate of eggs.

With the arrival of the food, Xander took a break from talking to attack it like a wild animal. Watching the youth eat, Jack realized that they had forgotten to feed him anything since they had recovered him from the NID. As Jack picked at his own plate, he assuaged his guilty conscience by telling himself that the kid had never asked for anything.

"After that, stuff just kept coming up and we just had to keep fighting back. That's what you get for letting a crazy cult build your town on top of a portal to hell."

"And you fought back with the army? Is Captain Finn your commanding officer?"

Hearing that question, Xander's expression darkened for some reason. "No, we did not work for the army," he answered definitively.

"Then who is Riley Finn?" Jack asked exasperatedly, feeling the entire foundation of his understand collapsing.

"Oh, well, he's one of my friend's many very complicated ex-boyfriends," Xander answered with a smile that could only be worn by one who delights in extending the confusion of others.

"The army doesn't bend over backwards just cause some captain's ex's friend calls in a favor!"

"Yeah, that's a whole other thing." Xander answered, in a not answering at all sort of way.

"I thought you were going to tell me about this stuff."

"I am, I just feel like you need some time to digest before things get more complicated."

Jack internally despaired at the idea of "more complicated," but he swallowed that feeling and said, "If you give me any time to think I'll just spend it questioning your sanity."

"I guess that's fair," Xander responded. "OK, so about five years ago now, a certain section from the army found out about all this demon crap and came to Sunnydale for research. They called themselves the Initiative. They did a bunch of stuff and some of it was good... but most of it was incredibly stupid. They tried to make a systematic approach to have soldiers solve supernatural problems and in order to do that they had their people take incredibly dangerous and addictive drugs. After that wasn't working the best, the obvious next step was apparently to turn people into weird Frankenstein combinations of different demon and robot parts."

"Wait, what?" Jack asked, completely taken aback by yet another sudden left turn.

"That was basically our reaction, but it's what they thought was best, I guess... It might be a bit of a spoiler, but it wasn't. The first prototype went out of control, as they do, and took over the base, killing or converting everyone. From there he was going to... well, demon Borg the world, basically. Resistance is futile and all that. Well, that was the plan, but my friends and I did some really uncomfortable stuff we are never gonna try again and we were able to clean it all up. More or less. Well, with that the small remnants of the Initiative and their bosses basically understood what happened, and that we saved their asses. Perhaps more importantly, they knew that us saving them meant we knew what happened and with all that, we sued for peace. We all came to an agreement that the army, for the most part, would not try to hunt demons and we wouldn't try to occupy nations. A place for every person and a person for every place."

"And that's why the army protects you?" Jack asked, passing beyond the realm of disbelief and straight into mystification.

"Pretty much, Riley really does help with all that, but the people who need to, know what we do. The Initiative was bad, in all kinds of ways, but the initial desire wasn't all that terrible. They wanted to protect people, we do protect people. Well, did, I'm kinda retired."

"I think if you were retired, you wouldn't be in this mess," Jack said with a smile.

"I aspire to retirement, then."

"Is that cause of what happened to Sunnydale?"

"Kind of, Something bad was coming. Something really bad, and we weren't going to be able to stop it. So instead, we collapsed the Hellmouth and most of the town with it."

"And that was it? It's closed?"

"No, not it. There are others, they aren't as bad, but they will get worse now. It's not over, Jack. It's never over until we lose. You are an old army man, I'm sure you know what I'm talking about."

"I guess that explains mostly everything. A lot of it is a little hard to make sense of for the moment, but I think I basically understand how it all fits together. So the only thing left is proof. Can you show me what you say is true."

"I've been thinking about that. It's not like I'm magic or a werewolf or anything convenient for show and tell, but I think I might be able to work something out," Xander answered, sounding unsure in his words. He then turned his attention back to what were certainly cold eggs and set to work demolishing their remnants.

When they had finished their meals, the waitress brought the check before Jack could finish organizing his thoughts. As the two of them looked at the ticket, Xander said, "You're paying, of course. After all, I gave you information, you know my price."

"I thought we were going for equivalent exchange?" Jack rebutted critically.

"Oh, right, well then. It wasn't just elementary school. All my teachers said I have problems with authority. Now we're even."

As the pair departed the dinner, Xander considered his options, vis-à-vis proof that the world is actually upside down. Well, considered his options is a bit generous, in reality he had only one real option. He was more searching for a way to say "lets go to the funeral home!" without sounding the definition of morbid.

Seeing as how he found no solution to that particular problem, he just put on a gruffly serious tone and vaguely gave an address as he fell into the passenger seat of the car. With that Jack seemed to realize that they were done talking for the moment and Xander turned his thoughts to what was to come.

He had heard that a little vampling would be turning at the home tonight from one of the local demons. Xander assumed that he had been told this to distract him from the fact that no one actually knew what he had wanted to know. Still, it was a problem that should probably be dealt with before it started eating the neighborhood, so he held onto the knowledge.  
>Originally, he had been planning to get the vamp while it was still young, hungry, and confused and try and work it over to find information on whoever turned it. However, circumstances dictate need and now he had to use it for a crash course in demon killing. As he thought over a rough plan for the encounter, he recognized an uncomfortable feeling and realized that he was completely unarmed for the first time in a long time. He checked the position of the setting sun to confirm he still had time and said, "Wait, let's swing by my motel first, I want to grab some stuff. I assume you're familiar with the place."<p>

Jack gave a look that said, "Don't go second guessing your uncertain allies," before he was forced to give a begrudging nod and change course.

"We have some time, why don't you tell me about whatever it is that you don't want me to know about that mountain?" Xander asked, as much out of boredom than burning curiosity at this point.

"A friend of mine was once ostracized, for what turned out to be a completely on the nose educated guess. Since then I've tried to be open to ideas which might be considered not completely sane, like yours. That doesn't mean I will reveal state secrets to you without some proof you are selling me some version of the truth."

"How unexpectedly official of you, Jack," Xander responded with a smile.

"It's almost like you're a real colonel."

"Yeah, sometimes I like to pretend," Jack answered as he pulled into the parking lot of Xander's motel.

"It'll just take a few seconds," Xander said as Jack parked. He then slid out of his seat and went in search of the closest thing he had to a home in the past year. When he found the beat up four door, he opened the door behind the driver's seat and grabbed the generic duffel which was waiting on the floorboards.

He returned to Jack, supplies in hand and motioned for the pair to set out again for the funeral home. The ride once again passed relatively smoothly. Neither of them felt quite up for speaking and aside from Xander's sporadic directions, silence reigned.

Unlike the Scoobies, who knew the location of every mausoleum and funeral home in town by heart, Jack didn't catch on to their destination until they pulled into the parking space outside. As Xander slowly pulled himself out of the truck and motioned for Jack to do the same, Jack turned and gave the younger man a look. "We aren't going grave robbing are we?" He asked, eying Xander's bag of tools skeptically.

"Yeah, it's something like that," Xander said absently as he tried his hand at the funeral homes front door.

"I'm pretty sure that is something I can't stand behind as a living person. It's right up there with cannibalism. It's a little bit of a no-no."

"I thought we were trying out that whole trusting thing." Xander said, the disapproval in his voice more directed at the door's lock than Jack.

"Not scoffing at you as you tell me you're a demon hunter and being complicit in a felony are two different things."

"Funny, you didn't strike me as the kind of guy that would let petty things like rules or laws stand in your way."

Jack frowned and said, "I generally try to obey the laws that involve not desecrating the dead bodies of random civilians."

"Like I said, you'll just have to trust me on this one," Xander responded dismissively, before turning to circle around the establishment. Looking around the back of the building, Xander quickly found something that looked promising and then turned to his bag of tools for help.  
>Watching Xander pull out a half brick from his black duffel bag, Jack raised his eyes and asked, "What are you doing now?"<p>

"Breaking and entering," Xander answered putting on his cheeriest smile.

"Isn't that a little inelegant?" Jack rebutted, apparently moving on from criticizing the morality of the crime to its execution.

"There's a funny thing I've noticed about breaking and entering," Xander answered, hefting the brick in his right hand. "If you pick the lock then people will look for someone who can pick locks. If you throw a brick through the window everyone looks for people dumb enough to throw bricks through windows. Speaking as someone who owns a set of lock picks, I find that trick very useful."

"It's a little disturbing how believable that is coming from you," Jack observed, apparently giving up on stopping Xander's crime spree.  
>Xander shrugged in response and then hurled the brick through the second story window, which was conveniently located next to an old oak.<p>

"Come on, it looks climbable enough, right?" He said as he pulled himself up the branches of the tree.

After Xander had made the wobbly transition from the branch of the oak into the now open window of the funeral home, he heard a terrible crack followed by a damp thump. He hurriedly turned to look out the window, finding the older man lying on the pavement below him. "Ok, it might not have been quite as climbable as I thought. My bad." He shouted down to his companion.

Jack's only response was a light groan, so Xander allowed a little concern to creep into his voice as he continued. "Would it be too clichéd to ask how your hip is? I mean accidents like this can be really unhealthy for a man of your… well, you know."

"Don't forget that I'm the one with the gun, kid." Jack hissed back.

Xander smiled at this and said, "If you are feeling good enough to threaten me, you must be fine. Sit tight I'll go down there and unlock the door."  
>With that, Xander turned his attention back to the darkened hallway in front of him. The decor was that special mix of residence and business unique to funeral homes that always gave Xander the creeps. Before going down the stairs, he gave the floor a quick sweep to see if anyone was there. As he had expected, the floor was empty and most likely so was the rest of the building. At this point, he was certain that morticians had a special sense for the supernatural, they were never around when things went belly up. Otherwise it would be a profession with a much higher mortality rate, considering how most places didn't have the Sunnydale policy of nearly immediate burial.<p>

After quickly searching the rest of the building, Xander opened the front door to find a distinctly grumpy colonel. "If you are just playing some elaborate prank on me, you're going to lose something you are attached to… physically." Jack growled as he pushed his way inside.

"Oh come on, don't look so upset. It was an honest mistake… mostly."

"Mostly?"

"Well, I thought it was about 60-40 odds that you would make it up without breaking the branch."

"And you didn't bother telling me?"

"Come on Jack, I didn't want to make you self-conscious about it. That's how anorexia starts."

"I'm not fat. You know I fight in wars, right?"

"What wars?" Xander asked sweetly.

At that, Jack just frowned and said, "Show me your proof."

"This way," Xander answered, leading Jack to a room that looked vaguely like a chapel, but didn't belong to any specific religion. The focus of the room was a closed casket which sat in front of the rows of seats. The wake would be tomorrow morning, so the owner of the place must have quickly set this all up before quitting early.

When they had entered the room and Xander had taken an aisle seat, Jack asked, "What are we doing now?"

"We're waiting. She should be here before too long. Be careful, though, she'll be hungry." Xander answered offhandedly.

"Who are we meeting? What does that even mean?"

"It's troublesome to explain and you won't really believe me till you see her anyway. It's better if you just wait." Xander said, turning his attention to his watch. To his surprise it was already 7:30, but based on his experience it could still be hours before the thing rose. He always hated this part, the tense waiting, followed by two minutes of pulse pounding quality time with death.

After a couple minutes, Jack opened his mouth to fill the silence. "Hey, can I ask you a question?"

"That is why we're here." Xander answered absently as he patted himself in search of his back up stake.

"How did you really lose your eye?"

Once again that terrifying smiling face floated through Xander's mind, but the question wasn't entirely unexpected, so he suppressed the thoughts quickly. "There was a bad guy who liked to pretend he was a priest. He said I was too good at seeing things and so he made me worse at it."

"Oh… That-"

"Sucks"

"Yeah…"

"Oh well, I got the last laugh in the end. My friend cut him in half balls first. It's good to find joy in the little things." Xander said with a smile, in an attempt to recover the mood a little bit.

Before Jack could respond to that, a creaking came from the front of the room and both men turned their attentions to the casket. As they watched the lid slowly cracked open and a human arm came into view followed by the rest of a body that seemed to belong to a girl in her early twenties. While her body looked normal, her face was that distinct mixture between a Klingon and a Rottweiler which spelled nothing but trouble for Xander.

"What is… she?" Jack asked, clearly shocked, but not quite enough for this to be his first encounter with the supernatural.

"Not something good, I can tell you that much," Xander answered as the monster in front of them stopped sniffing the air and turned its attention to the two of them. "Why don't you try out shooting it?"

Jack hesitated for a second, but when the new vampling started rushing towards them at speeds that would put a lioness to shame, his instincts took over. He drew his gun and put three rounds into her center of mass in one fluid motion. Xander could only admire that immaculate handling. Especially with what had to be a high caliber hand gun, considering how it laid her on her ass, hard.

In spite of how slayers classically eschewed firearms due to their lack of killing power, they were still useful. Just like rubber bullets could discourage rioting, real bullets can discourage vampires from moving for a bit. Hell, if you could get them in the right joint you could stop them in their tracks for days. That was why Xander had been trying to get used to firing them since he struck out on his own. Still, they were only useful to a point and it was about time for that to become painfully obvious. "You should probably give me that now," Xander said as he gently took the handgun from Jack's grip. Once again Xander had to marvel at the man's fortitude in identifying between friendly and hostile contact in this situation.

Putting the gun aside and readying his stake, Xander watched the girl that was still laying on the ground. He was starting to get a little impatient, when she finally started to get back to her feet. Jack's reaction was very different, as his breath quickened at the sight. Xander didn't have the time to pay attention to Jack, however, as he braced himself for another charge.  
>A charge that didn't come. After a few seconds of watching the vampling standing still in front of them, it dawned on him. While vampires were all incorrigible monsters, they were each their own person. Every once in a while you would run into one of them that had absolutely no pain tolerance.<p>

Watching the girl he could see the war going on behind her wary eyes. She was starving and couldn't pass up the meal in front of her, but at the same time, she didn't want to get shot again. As these two impulses were almost perfectly balanced, she just stood there doing nothing.  
>In order to break the stalemate, Xander pricked his finger slightly to get the blood flowing. He then flicked a few drops at the vampling and made a show of saying, "Oh my, I'm just so full of blood. It's like I would be a walking buffet, if there was anyone who ate the stuff."<p>

The smell of old people and air freshener still dominated the air, but Xander knew the vamp's nostrils were just filled with the scent of blood. It was like they were sharks or something. As Xander felt a look of frenzied hunger settle on him, the vampling let out a guttural shriek and charged again.

Before the thing could get to him, Xander put his foot on the chair in front of him and kicked. The frenzied youngster wasn't paying attention to anything below neck height and was easily tripped, landing to a blubbering halt at Xander's feet. Before it could recover, Xander brought his entire weight down onto the monster's heart with the stake he had in his right hand.

As the vampire whispered into dust, Xander heard Jack mutter, "I knew it wasn't an accident," from beside him, but chose to ignore it. Instead, he turned to his disappointingly not dumbstruck companion.

"What do you think?"

"It wanted blood, and it had fangs, and it turned to dust. So that was a vampire?"

"I'm used to people being a little less capable of deduction at this point, but yes."

"Well, I've seen some weird stuff too."

"And are you ready to tell me about it now?"

"Let's go back to base, I think I have some stuff to show you."


	5. Chapter 5

After the pair had gotten back into the truck and Jack had enough time to more fully digest what had just happened, he turned to Xander and asked, "So there are more of those things out there?"

"Yeah, all over the place. Kinda like a plague, but less. So I guess, not really like a plague at all then. Instead I guess the best analogy would be spiders. They're all over the place, but they kill less people than you feel like they should and sometimes when they get partway through eating something, they decided to use its corpse to make more of themselves. Most vampires get the lowest spot on the list of things that might ruin your night. Plus, they leave no mess that can't be cleaned up by a hoover. That's something you can appreciate after dealing with a sewage demon or two."  
>After trying to create a private list, cross referencing his meanest enemies with those that are hardest to clean up after, Xander turned to look at Jack.<p>

The man was surprisingly silent for a man who should be desperate for answers that don't involve a boogie man. Instead he was just staring aimlessly at the road, while making a face. Recognizing the look Xander sighed and spoke again. "Listen, Jack I know I don't really know you well, but I know we're a little alike. Which is why I know you are planning on making some really bad decisions right now…. So… stop it, I guess."

After Xander's statement petered out of existence, Jack made a sound that was somewhere between a groan and a growl before saying, "We work every day to keep people safe, but now I know they die anyway. Even worse they die at the hands of things like that. It's unbearable."

"I said it before, we should all stick with our own things. Besides, my friends save the lives that can be saved. They average at least 6 billion a year, in fact. They fight the battles you can't, it's better to acknowledge that now."

"We have resources you don't know about, Xander. There has to be something we can do."  
>"Nope, nothing. I said it before, but the military already tried all this. Besides, you saw it yourself, the things we fight don't play by the same rules everyone else does. The laws of physics kind of stop working at their skin. You could have kept shooting that vampire for a decade and it wouldn't have done anything. Wooden stake to the heart, holy water, crosses, fire, and sunlight are the only things that will work, and they are some of the most straight forward monsters out there." Xander let his words sink in for a bit before continuing. "Instead of dwelling on that, I think it's about time you tell me about that sea portal you've got your hands on."<p>

Jack sighed, clearly not completely convinced by Xander's logic. "You're going to need to sign some things when we get back to base."

"As long as you aren't asking for my first born son… or asking me to have a first born son, then I think we'll be fine."

"No, it'll just say something like, 'if you tell our secrets to anyone I will hunt you down and drop you in one of those hell dimensions you were talking about.'"

"Can you actually make it say that? Cause that would be fun."

"I'll see what I can do…" Then Jack shook his head and slowly started to talk in the same uncertain tone Xander had used in the diner.

"Well, you've heard about how some people want to say that certain monuments like stone henge or the pyramids were built with the help of aliens?"

"Oh, you mean that history channel guy? I love him." Xander answered allowing himself to get excited again for the first time since they left the diner. "'I'm not saying it was aliens, but it was aliens.' One of my friends… well not exactly a friend, more like an enemy that was too pathetic to beat too badly. Anyway, he loves that show. He says he saw a really persuasive research paper about how the pyramids were landing platforms for spaceships, but he has a hard time telling fantasy from reality."

"Well, not to say you're wrong about your not friend or anything, but... He may not be quite as wrong as you think," Jack responded almost apologetically.

"How not wrong?"

"Not wrong at all, if he's talking about the report I'm thinking of."

"This can't be happening," Xander sighed out as he slumped back into his chair. "If you're right, then I owe Andrew half a million dollars. I said it as a joke, obviously, but then he took it so stupid seriously... If he ever finds out about this, it'll be such a... thing."

Jack waited for Xander to finish letting out another long sigh, before he continued. "I guess it's better to just rip the Band-Aid off, right? So it turns out most of the ancient pagan gods were actually based on aliens called the Goa'uld. Just like the thing you killed when we first met, they're little snake things that get in your brain and take you over. Their superior technology looked like terrible miracles to ancient people and they ruled over the earth as gods. Eventually, people got fed up with being slaves and rebelled, forcing off the Goa'uld oppressors."

"How?" Xander interrupted curiously.

"How what?"

"How did they fight off the aliens? I mean they have spaceships, right? They could just sit in orbit and shoot lasers or whatever at all the little people down below. How did a bunch of people who just figured out pointy stick technology compete with that?"

"Well there are obviously not a lot of records from back then, but even a primitive can learn from example. They probably stole weapons from the Goa'uld and then made it too expensive to stick around. Once the Goa'uld were gone, the humans buried the gate so they couldn't come back."

"Gate?" Xander asked quizzically.

"Oh, right, sorry. I forgot to say that part. The Goa'uld had spaceships, but traveling between stars in them takes a long time. Generally they move between worlds using this even ancienter device we call the StarGate. It's that stone ring you saw before. Using complex science stuff it creates a wormhole between two gates, letting people walk between worlds in an instant."

Hearing that last detail, everything started to come together around Willow's research. Xander took a second to once again marvel at his friend's ability to slog through millennia old texts, before he nodded his understanding at the colonel.

Jack gave a brief smile at Xander's acceptance before continuing. "Well that was pretty much that, until we rediscovered the gate at a dig site in Egypt. It was then brought back here and a few years ago Daniel found out how to turn it on. From there we rediscovered the Goa'uld and they rediscovered us. Then we kind of pissed all of them off and they've been trying to conquer the Earth at least once a year since then."

"And you've stopped them?"

"Pretty much. In the beginning everything was uncertain. We were going up against a foe who was centuries ahead technologically and we knew nothing about them. Since then we've learned about them and we've made some allies. We've even been able to catch up to their tech a little."

"Like the scorpion phasers?"

"They're called Zat'nik'tels, but yes. We've done everything we can to prepare for war."

"And that includes allies… Any of them little green men?"

"Not green, grey… and mysterious."

"I wouldn't have it any other way. When you figure out why someone is mutilating cattle, it's never as romantic as you imagined."

"I would. The Goa'uld may be afraid of them, but we have no way to contact them if we are in trouble. Mostly we've been fighting back using insurgent warfare, relying on rebelling slaves and the opposing faction of the Goa'uld as much as possible."

With that the pair fell silent for a while, both of them just staring at the road. After a couple minutes Jack broke the silence. "You know when you were going through you're whole song and dance, I participated. The least you could do is say whether my story is believable or not."

"Sorry, just thinking about everything. Your whole story sounds really insane. However, it also sounds suspiciously similar to some info my friend found researching head snakes. Minus all the alien space travel stuff, obviously."

"The alien space travel stuff is like 90% of it."

"Well I've also seen the gate in person. Weird crap that was. Anyway, I'll silently believe you until you let me take a trip through it. Obviously you're gonna let me go through it, right? I mean I risked personal life and limb to show you the slaying of a vampire."

"You risked my life and limb too, you know," Jack grumbled back.

"Well, you gotta break a few eggs."

"Just for the sake of breaking them?"

"Sure, why not?"

Jack let a few seconds pass in silence before sighing. "I'm not sure if my boss will green light an interstellar field trip."

"He doesn't have to know, I can be really, really quiet," Xander responded, whispering as proof.

"Your sneaking skills aren't really the deciding issue here."

"You know I've saved your life. At least twice."

"You aren't the only one here who's saved the world, kid."

"Yeah, but you came out of it with both eyes intact."

Jack turned to Xander and gritted his teeth, clearly bemoaning that there was no appropriate response to that.

"You know, I really loved depth perception. It makes you so much better a stuff that you don't even realize." Xander said sorrowfully, laying on one final assault.

"Fine, when we get back we will go talk to Hammond. You can give him your puppy dog eye and see how well he responds."

"Victory!" Xander shouted exaggeratedly.

From there the conversation pretty much died once again and before it could be resurrected, they had arrived back at Jack's secret fort in Cheyenne Mountain. On the way down into the base Xander tried to play with Jack a little, but the other man seemed to have reclaimed his role as a stern colonel and wouldn't poke back. Instead, Xander focused his energies on examining the soldiers that passed them by in the hall. He marveled at the sheer number of people they expected to keep this secret. If there were even half this many people in the Scoobies they wouldn't have gone a weekend without getting grounded.

While Xander privately struggled with the logistics of secret keeping, another realization struck him. It was a recognition which hit fast and fierce, like a lightning bolt through his heart. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say it struck him like the memory of a lightning bolt. For half a second, murderous rage dominated his mind. It didn't take long for him to replace this impulse with inquisitiveness, but Jack noticed the change in energy.  
>"What's wrong?" The older man asked.<br>Ignoring him, Xander said nothing and followed the familiar face through the corridors. He didn't know how well he could tail someone with no cover, but his quarry seemed too focused on not seeming uncomfortable, to pay him any notice. By the time he realized where they were going, Xander had already found himself standing before the giant ring once again.

As Xander stared at the two men he had followed, one of them took out a device that looked like a smart phone and fiddled with it. That was when everything got very serious very quickly. Alarms sounded, blast doors all over the room closed and the stone ring started spinning all by itself.

As he stared at the spectacle, Xander sensed Jack start to move and he held out a hand. "I want to see what they do."

"They're from the NID a black ops organization set out to destroy us. I can't let them just play around with MY gate," Jack hissed back.

Before Xander could respond to that sentiment, there was a roar from the gate and a pillar of water shot out from it. When the surface of the wormhole stabilized, the two NID agents quickly disappeared into it. As soon as they were gone, Xander started to run.

"We have no idea what's waiting for us on the other side," Jack's cautioned as he ran beside Xander.

"Exactly, it could be topless women with beer. You never know until you find out!" Shouting this Xander leapt through the wormhole without hesitation.

As Xander stepped out into what seemed like the verdant clearing of a forest, he forgot to breathe for several seconds. "That was amazing! It felt kind of like having an orgasm while vomiting in the arctic!" He exclaimed when he remembered how his lungs worked. Coming down from that high, he gave a more thorough scan of his surroundings. He quickly noticed the struggling figures of Jack and the NID operatives at the base of the steps leading to the gate.

"Help would be nice!" Jack grunted out when he noticed Xander's gaze.

"Right," Xander answered. He then took a running leap into the closer of the two men Jack was facing, latching onto the man's back like a parasite. Contrary to everything Xander had experienced in life up until this point; the man collapsed like a cheap card table. The idea that normal humans couldn't support a grown man on their back never crossed Xander's mind. The two equally surprised men found themselves on the ground in a pile of limbs almost instantaneously. From that point it was a mad scramble. The smaller, balding man wasn't suited for hand to hand combat, however, and Xander was able to send him into unconsciousness with a few blows to the head.

By the time Xander had extracted himself from that mess and brushed himself off, Jack had already silenced his sparring partner as well. Surveying the unconscious ex-torturers, Xander made a self-satisfied smile and said, "That was very nearly a text book operation, if I do say so myself."

"Oh, I'm sure the dog-pile approach to a melee is taught in dojos all over the world," Jack observed sarcastically.

"So this is another world?" Xander asked, ignoring the Colonel's barb. "It's so different… or not actually. Not different at all really. It kind of just looks like Canada. I took an awful family vacation up to Vancouver in grade school and this was pretty much it."

"Yeah, we get that a lot," Jack answered with a shrug. "What were you expecting? The people who made the gates had a realm of comfort that was pretty similar to humans. It's not like they would have wanted to live on a planet made of ice or in a volcano any more than we do now."

"I guess…" Xander responded hesitantly. "Still, I was hoping for something a little more alien… OK, I think I'm ready to go home then."

"Already? After you twisted my arm so much to take you out?"

"Well, if there are no topless women, or beer, or laser spiders, I just don't see what the point is. Besides, now that I think of it I have some friends that might worry if I spend too much time light years from Earth."

Jack gave one final shrug at this sentiment and turned to examine the gate, before noticing something and freezing. "Ummmm. About getting home… There's supposed to be a little console somewhere around here."

Xander turned a concerned eye to Jack and said, "I'm sure that does unimportant stuff like change the color of the portal and make it shoot confetti, right?"

"It doesn't do any of that, but it does tell it where we want to go… and turn it on."

"That makes it sound like we're stuck. On an alien planet. Light years from home. But I don't have pointy elf ears, so I know that can't be true."

Before Jack could respond to that, they heard voices calling from a short distance down the path leading away from the gate. Hearing this the two men looked at each other and both evaluated the results of similar situations they had been in. At the same time the two dove behind the StarGate.


	6. Chapter 6

It didn't take long for bullets to follow the pair's retreat. They quickly found themselves ducking in the grass, trying not to wet themselves at the sound of every ricochet.

"You're the expert. What do we do now?" Xander tried yelling over the cacophony.

The older man took a cursory glance over their cover before immediately ducking down again and thinking. "I don't think you can stake your way out of this one."

"Exactly, this is more of a conquering nations kinda situation, military man."

"Well, if I could get some sort of distraction or something, we could run into the trees. The two of us could probably lose them in a dense forest like this. What could we use for cover though?"

As the older man devolved into asking himself questions, Xander seemed to have an idea. He then reached into his coat, pulling out a fist sized metal tube and using it to tap Jack on the chest.

"Is that a smoke grenade?!" The older man asked excitedly.

"So I think I'm gonna throw this, and then we're gonna run. That's about as deep as our plans can get at the moment, right?" Xander proposed, ignoring his companion. With that declaration, Xander pulled the pin and tossed the grenade out in front of the gate. As smoke started to billow up, blocking the pair from view, they bolted for the forest.

When they were satisfied that they were out of earshot of the men with guns, Jack turned to Xander. "Where did you get an active smoke grenade from?"

"Army Navy Surplus store?"

"Why was that a question?"

"I was wondering if you'd like that explanation better than me stealing it from your armory, when I stumbled into it before."

Jack gave Xander a stern look and asked,"What else did you take?"

"…Nothing."

"You paused. People are lying when they pause!"

"I'm being honest… they found everything else"

Jack sighed at that and turned to survey their surroundings. "This doesn't look too good, does it?"

"So we're officially stuck? What options do we have here Mr. Expert?"

"Well the SGC is probably pouring everything they have into finding how to get to us, but even if they send a rescue team…"

"They'll be just as stuck as we are?"

"Pretty much. It's not like a few extra people will make fashioning an ancient alien control device out of pine cones and twigs any more possible."

"What about the other guys? You know, the ones that want us dead so badly?"

"Well, they seem to have some sort of foothold here. However, the NID have never been a peerless example of competence. I would not be surprised to learn that they were all stuck here just like us. It is still possible that they have some way of getting off of here, though."

"So I guess we cross our fingers and hope for option number two?"

"The way you make that sound like a stroll through the park is unsettling."

"Oh, come on, how many of them can there be?"

"Based on how little we know and the population of the earth. I would say the absolute MAXIMUM would be around six billion or so."

"See? Child's play."

It took them about two hours to finally find any sign of human activity and it came in the form of a small two man patrol. Apparently the hours since the encounter at the gate had been just as disheartening for the NID, as they had been for Xander. It was clear the men were focused less on actually searching for threats, as they were on complaining about whatever was around them. The sounds of soldiers whining were easy to track, even through the dense forest. After about thirty minutes, the patrol route led back to what Xander thought would properly be called a compound.

"What do you think?" Xander asked Jack as the pair squatted at the edge of the clearing which the NID were occupying.

"Well, there's one actual building and a bunch of tents, so I'm guessing that log cabin looking thing is our best bet."

"I was more asking if them Swiss Family Robinsoning the place boded not well for us."

"Flip a coin," Jack said with a shrug. "We thought they had wanted to set up an off-world base for a while now. How they went about doing it is a little… special ed, but as I said before, that's not entirely shocking."

"So we're going for the building to find a way to turn on the thing, right? There aren't a whole lot of dudes here, but I assume this is the kind of thing best done at night."

"Well, sure if you want to be all tactical about it," Jack answered with a nod. He then glanced at the sky and said, "I guess that means we are going to be playing the waiting game for a while. Know any good stories?"

"Well there was that time I kind of summoned the demon prince of musicals."

"Wait… that exists?"

"To preface the story I guess you need to know that my friend had just died and come back to life."

"That… is something I'm familiar with, actually."

"Right. So she was being all upset about that and everyone was just generally tense. I thought the singing and stuff would be fun. I definitely didn't know people would dance themselves to death."

"Ok, I definitely need to hear this."

After Xander described his experiences living in a musical and Jack had responded with how he had come to contain the entire knowledge of the universe for a week, night had finally fallen. It was time for their daring assault.

"You know, if this really is their secret Nazi moon base or whatever, it must be in REALLY early development. There are only like four guys here." Xander observed conversationally as the pair crept between the tents.

"Shh. You do understand that quietness is the basic fundamental of sneaking, yes?"

Just as Xander was about to hiss a response to this, Jack held out a hand and pointed at the only man standing guard in front of their destination. "It seems like he's the only guard."

"Yep."

"Go get him."

"What? You go get him. I'm just a tourist here."

"You're the one that's all about ancient hand to hand combat and stuff. That's perfect for this. Go judo chop him unconscious or something."

"I can't just..." Xander responded before sighing and turning his attention to the ground. He then picked up a rock and sent it pinging into the wall behind the guard.

As the guard started to turn to investigate the noise, Xander was already in a full sprint. When the guard turned back, Xander was on him. A fist in the man's stomach sent all the air out of his lungs before he could shout. Not letting his opponent think, Xander spun around him and wrapped an arm around the guard's neck.

As the guard was sent gasping into dreamland, Jack approached, saying, "See, I knew you were all over that crouching tiger hidden dragon stuff."

"Yes, cause that was exactly like jumping from tree top to tree top, colliding your kicks in mid-air." Xander responded sarcastically, as he leaned the guard up against the wall of the building.

Moving past the recumbent guard, Jack pushed the door to the cabin open, saying, "So much for security. It doesn't even have a latch."

"I told you, Swiss Family Robinson. You are looking at a building that was constructed exclusively through whittling."

When the both of them had entered the building, they were greeted with the vision of a circular, vaguely Egyptian keyboard which dominated the room. "Kind of exactly what I was imagining really." Xander observed. "Except circular. I did not think it would be circular."

'That's weird, there's something stuck on the back," Jack said gesturing at a small box haphazardly adhered to the DHD. "That usually isn't there."

"What do you think it is? Could that be how they knew the gate had been opened when we arrived? They did show up pretty fast, and this place is not within eye-shot."

"What do I look like, a scientist? All I can say is that it's weird, and that we don't have the time to worry about it." Saying this, Jack knelt down at the front of the DHD and held out his hand to Xander. "Do you have a flashlight?"

"I was kidnapped three times this week and then got stranded on an alien planet. I'm pretty sure just about everything I own was just lost in the shuffle there." After a moment's reflection, he added, "Dammit, I was supposed to check out today! They're gonna throw away all my stuff!"

"Fine, you may have only one eye, but it's younger than both of mine. Come look over here."

Moving over to crouch next to Jack, Xander asked, "What is it I'm looking for?"

"The address of the gate. It's written on the front of the DHD, just under the lip. The shadow makes it a bitch to see, took us two and a half years to find because of that."

"Ok, I think I see something carved there. It looks like a tall guy with a shifty hat, and then a burglar kangaroo, and-"  
>"Just write it down," Jack interrupted, waving a pen in front of Xander's face. As Xander took it and started recreating the address on his forearm, Jack turned to take a peek outside. After finding nothing of interest he turned back and said, "You know they shouldn't be able to throw your stuff away. They got to hold onto it for at least 24 hours, that has to be a policy somewhere. Just go check at the office when you get back."<p>

Xander sighed at this and said, "Yeah, well the nice manager was not amused when I said SHE reminded me of Jim Belushi. I should have looked at her name tag first. Amanda is not a guy's name."

"Yeah, you're probably screwed."

Xander nodded and then said, "Got it. What now?"

"Hold onto it. Now we dial home and sneak back without a hitch." Saying that, Jack started to punch in the familiar address of home. When he struck the final key, however, sirens started blaring all over the base.

At that, Jack could only close his eyes ruefully. After a few seconds, Xander said, "Hey, you know that box we were talking about earlier?"

"Yeah?"

"You reckon that was an alarm?" With that they both let their shoulders slump and then moved to crouch next to the doorway out of the room.

"If you're hiding any other toys from our armory, now would be a good time to use them," Jack said, taking a peak out of the window at the approaching attackers.

"Like I said, they took everything else back. It was hard enough sneaking the grenade past them. If we survive this, maybe you should get your bosses to re-think their policy on souvenirs."

"Two unarmed guys against an army in the middle of their own base? If we survive this, I'll get them to buy you a damn harrier."

At that, Xander paused for a moment before producing a knife, seemingly out of the ether, and saying, "I think I have a plan."

As the confused and wary men gathered outside the building, Xander suddenly stepped out of the doorway, holding Jack in front of him and pressing a knife to the older man's throat. "Step back or I slit his throat from ear to ear," Xander growled at the congregation.

At that point, something magical happened, none of the gathered men had quite caught up to what had been happening and so they each went through the same flow chart. If someone is held hostage, then they are important. Is the man being held hostage? Yes. Thus he is important. They couldn't let him die. As they all came to this conclusion, the men directly in front of Xander moved away, each man confident that the others knew what was going on.  
>Xander and Jack slowly made their way through the press of men and to the edge of the clearing the camp was in. Just as they were about to escape, one of the guards with better night vision said, "Who was that guy?"<p>

After a few seconds, in which the soldiers all counted how many of them were there, the spell was broken. At that point, Xander, Jack, and every soldier behind them, all started to run at the same time.

"That was only slightly better than the hold yourself hostage plan. What are you, a cartoon?" Jack yelled to the backdrop of gunfire, as the pair once again found themselves running through the woods.

"Well, whenever I'm in a real jam, I ask myself: What would Bugs Bunny do?"

"And that principle has served you well, has it?"

"We're alive, aren't we?"

As a bullet cut through the space between the two of them, they had to give up on bickering and focus on running. They were able to cover what had taken an hour of walking in ten minutes and quickly found themselves within sight of the gate. They also could see the two silhouettes, which stood between them and home. Two familiar silhouettes.

"They're still there?" Xander wheezed incredulously.

"I guess the others thought chasing us was more important than helping their friends," Jack observed from beside him.

With the gunfire still pressing from behind, they had no choice but to go forward, regardless of any obstructions. The pair put everything they had into the last few steps to the gate. Reaching it, Xander channeled all those guys that were good at baseball. He kicked out his feet into a slide under the torturer's legs, his momentum barely carrying him through the gate. At the same time, Jack put all his speed into a flying tackle which collided with the torturer's assistant, pushing them both through the blue portal.

Finally back on earth, the three men were greeted with the reassuring feeling of the steel catwalk as they tumbled awkwardly down it. At the bottom, Jack reared up to deliver one final punch to his captive's head. He then turned towards the control room and lifted Xander's forearm, shouting, "Redial!"

Hammond was having both a good and a bad day. First, NID agents had once again snuck into his facility and uploaded a virus to take over gate control. They then ran away to an unknown location, deleting the address before the virus could be wiped from the system. Then Jack, one of his top operatives, had been returned safely from said unknown enemy installation. Also, thanks to his staff's quick thinking, the SGC was able to connect back to the NID gate before they could dial out. The clean-up crews he sent in were able to detain all the enemy agents and they were able to get gobs of intel to boot. However, that also meant Hammond would be spending the next forever doing paperwork. Add onto all that how little he still knew about the Harris kid and it was shaping up to be a good and a bad day. The General was ruminating on this as he approached his office and heard voices coming from inside.

"I get what you're saying. It's weird how cyclical life can be. For example, it seems like the really crazy stuff happens around here basically once a week." Unmistakably Jack's voice was saying.

"I know right? And what is it with the end of spring that makes people want to blow up the world? Do villains all have seasonal depression or something?" and that was the mystery boy.

Hammond sighed to himself and then heaved open his office door. "What do you want?" He asked the room, making it clear that he was too busy for playing around.

The pair adapted quickly to the interruption and Hammond could see Jack start giving the Harris boy meaningful looks. As the General moved to sit behind his desk, the Harris boy stood up and said, "Ummm… I don't know how exactly to say this, but… Job please!"

Hammond just stood there stunned for a moment before he could fully register what the youth had said. "You want me to hire on a kid with suspicious origins onto a top secret military project with only his assurance that he isn't a bad guy to speak for him?" Asking this, he looked over the other two men.

The kid had a hopeful, yet sheepish expression which fit too well on a face with an eye patch. Meanwhile Jack was giving a look that could only be compared with a child who had brought home a stray puppy. Hammond simply sighed again before nodding. Maybe he should just call today a bad day.

On the other side of the planet, in a cave hidden on the border between China and India, a small bookish man was standing outside of a suspiciously metallic door nestled into the rock face. The small man was taking a few deep breaths in an attempt to calm his nerves when a booming voice interrupted him. "Come in."

The man jumped slightly at this, but quickly recovered and stepped into the dark room beyond. Before him stood a mountainous figure, nothing but a silhouette in the darkness. When the monster turned to face its new guest, its glowing golden eyes showed through as the only thing that gave it definition.

"What is it?" The figure asked in a voice that was quieter than before, if no less commanding.

"Several things to report," The small man answered in a squeaky uncertain tone. "First, all remaining earth bound agents of the NID have been either brought into the fold or silenced."

"Very good." The figure said, making movements as if returning to a seat. "What of the ones that fled the planet? I must say using their enemy's gate to flee my grasp was an interesting move. Your people on a whole are proving surprisingly resourceful. It almost makes me regret that they must all be killed. They could make interesting opponents if I didn't have so many already."

The man who could at best be described as secretarial waited for a moment, knowing his new boss did not like to be interrupted in his musings. Deciding that it was his turn to talk again, he took one final deep breath and said, "There is a problem with that…"

"What problem?" The figure asked, the light in its eyes shining somehow colder than it had before.

"The Goa'uld specimen you attempted to create refused to listen to orders. According to its handlers it broke away as soon as it could and started on a rampage. It only stopped when someone from the SGC killed it."

The figure let out a deep growl of distaste for a while until it finally said, "Very well. As disappointing as it may be, it appears I will require a queen before I make any more progress on that front. What of the insurgent effort, aside from that hiccup?"

"From what I can gather, the men were recognized on their way through the SGC. They were followed through the gate and the men that followed them led the rest of the SGC through to opposition compound. They took the men into custody and confiscated the materials."

"So you are telling me that your men have failed me as thoroughly as possible?!" The figure growled, as it stood once again to its full imposing height.

In reaction to this, the secretary jumped backwards and almost fell over in fright. In response the monstrous figure sighed out some of its angry energy.

"I will not kill you for this." It declared, as if it was a close thing. "You have merely given me an opportunity to demonstrate my magnanimity."

At this, the secretary started to breathe once again in utter relief. That was until the figure interrupted again, "However, surrounding myself with incompetence is an affront to my dignity, don't you agree? Do not allow my name to be uncovered prematurely. If you fail me in this, I will not be so lenient."

"Y-yes." The secretary answered, frantically back pedaling towards the door while trying out an awkward bow.

"Also, I need more of these texts," The figure shouted as he grabbed a book by its cover and gestured so violently that its spine ripped and pages spilled over the floor. "I must continue learning."

With that the secretary fled the room and the cave it was hidden in. Silence fell in behind him for several minutes, as the figure remained with its thoughts.

"To develop so much in such a short time. Humans really have become interesting." Saying this to himself, the great sage equal to heaven, then turned his gaze to the east, as if daring the distant mountain range to come into view.

Notes: So this is the end of this first story in the series. At the end here I am both giving an explanation for the NID's even more stupid than normal behavior, and just briefly introducing the entity that will be the main bad guy for this series. I do intend to continue this series, but I am unsure when I will have the next piece ready as my muse has not been moving in that direction recently. I want to thank everyone who has taken the time to read, review, or recommend my first story here. I really appreciate all of your feedback and engagement!


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